Comment by DennisP
2 days ago
So if you're a well-off retiree living on long-term investments and don't want your finances public, then, what, you have to donate extra money to the government? Because long-term gains are simply taxed at a lower rate. It's not some kind of special tax-avoidance scheme you can just refrain from doing.
I think most people intuitively group people that have worked their whole lives and living off of their retirement savings and pensions and those that have inherited vast amounts of wealth and haven't worked the differently. Another group would be people that became very wealthy during life due to business, and yet structure their wealth in a way that avoids taxes because the relatively little they need to life their luxuriously life isn't represented as income either.
We know these are different, it also seems quite unfair that their standard of living would be unaffected by higher taxes but poorer people are sometimes disastrously affected.